Atheists: The Origin of the Species

By Nick Spencer

The clash between atheism and religion has become the defining battle of the 21st century.

Books on and about atheism retain high profile and popularity, and atheist movements on both sides of the Atlantic capture headlines with high-profile campaigns and adverts. However, very little has been written on the history of atheism, and this book fills that conspicuous gap.

Instead of treating atheism just as a philosophical or scientific idea about the non-existence of God, Atheists: The Origin of the Species places the movement in its proper social and political context. Because atheism in Europe developed in reaction to the Christianity that dominated the continent's intellectual, social and political life, it adopted, adapted and reacted against its institutions as well as its ideas. Accordingly, the history of atheism is as much about social and political movements as it is scientific or philosophical ideas.

This is the story not only of Hobbes, Hume, and Darwin, but also of Thomas Aitkenhead hung for blasphemous atheism, Percy Shelley expelled for adolescent atheism, and the Marquis de Sade imprisoned for libertine atheism; of the French revolutionary Terror and the Soviet League of the Militant Godless; of the rise of the US Religious Right and of Islamic terrorism.

Looking at atheism in its full sociopolitical context helps explain why it has looked so very different in different countries. It also explains why there has been a recent upsurge in atheism, particularly in Britain and the US, where religion has unexpectedly come to play such a significant role in political affairs. This leads us to a somewhat paradoxical conclusion: we should expect to hear more about atheism in the future for the simple reason that God is back.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: May 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781472902979

Nick Spencer

Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos, the Christian think tank. He is the author of a number of books and reports, including Magisteria (Oneworld, 2023), The Evolution of the West (SPCK, 2016), Atheists: The Origin of the Species (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Darwin and God (SPCK, 2009). Outside of Theos, Nick is Visiting Research Fellow at the Faiths and Civil Society Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion.

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ATHEISTS: THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES

Atheists: The Origin of the Species

Nick Spencer

Dedicated to the memory of Robin Joyce (1973–2013), endlessly fascinated by its subject, present at its conception, not at its conclusion. Badly missed.

Atheism is often merely a variety of Christianity. In fact, several varieties. There is the High Church Atheism of Matthew Arnold, there is the Auld Licht Atheism of our friend Mr J. M. Robertson, there is the Tin Chapel Atheism of Mr D. H. Lawrence. And there is the decidedly Low Church Atheism of Mr Russell.

T. S. Eliot, reviewing Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, 1927

Atheism should always be encouraged (i.e. rationalistic not emotional atheism) for the sake of the Faith.

T. S. Eliot to Richard Aldington, 24 February 1927

Atheist as I am sir, atheist as I am, no man shall stand between my soul and my God!

Heckler at a Christian Socialist Lecture, quoted in F. C. Bettany,

Stewart Headlam (John Murray, 1926)

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 – Possibilities

Types of atheism

New worlds

Authority and scepticism

‘Science and Religion’

Questioning the Bible

Thomas Hobbes’ Christian atheism

Spinoza, the great leader of our modern unbelievers

Crossing the Rubicon

Chapter 2 – Pioneers

Immoral atheists

The reasonable English

German toleration

French fury

British moderation

American silence

Chapter 3 – Promises

The road from revolution

The road to revolution (part 1)

The road to revolution (part 2)

The reaction to reaction

Science and religion, once again

The high point of British atheism

Chapter 4 – Problems

Nietzsche’s dead god

The first death of British atheism

The kingdom of godlessness is at hand

Germany, Britain, France, America: Mid-century

Building godless societies

Decline and fall

New dawns

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

There are number of people without whom this book would be larger, weaker, duller or non-existent.

I owe a great deal to Caroline Chartres at Bloomsbury who saw the potential for a history of atheism just as I was trying to pitch a different book altogether. She came up with a title, persuading me out of something much more worthy and much less memorable. No less importantly, she talked me down from the ledge of a much longer book. I don’t know which I should be more grateful for. Thanks are also due to Joel Simons who carefully steered the book through production.

I was delighted when my old friend Phill Hatton agreed to do the artwork for the cover, filling the gap that the Cameleopard left in our lives. His work turned out to be even more impressive than I had imagined it would.

A number of people read and commented on the manuscript in whole or in parts. I am grateful to them all but would like to single out three in particular: John Coffey, whose constant supply of advice and encouragement is truly humbling; John Hedley Brooke whose knowledge of the topic and eye for detail knows no peers; and Toby Hole, whose friendship and wisdom is one of the things that makes life worth living.

I was extremely grateful to Charles Devellennes for allowing me to read his unpublished doctoral thesis on the atheism of Jean Meslier and Baron D’Holbach, on which Chapter 2 draws.

My colleagues at Theos – Elizabeth Oldfield, Paul Bickley, Ben Ryan, and Alanna Harris – have been a constant support, as have Katie, Ellen and Jonny without whom none of this is worthwhile.

The dedication contains one final, enormous debt, which was never fully recognized.

Nick Spencer

London, 2013

Introduction

Once upon a time there was a terrible monster that lived in the sky. No one had ever seen it because it lived a long way away, and because it was invisible, but everyone knew it was there because a long time ago it had shown itself to some very clever men.

These very clever men explained how the monster had one head, three bodies and a thousand eyes, with which it could see into people’s souls. They told terrible tales of what the monster would do if it got angry but also of how kind it was if people would only worship it without thought or question. They explained how the monster had given them a powerful magic, which, if used rightly, would protect the world from evil.

Sometimes the monster would get angry and when it did the clever men would offer it sacrifices, dragging people into market squares where they would burn them alive, just to show the monster how much they loved it.

The people listened to the very clever men and believed them. But they still yearned to be free of the monster.

And then, one day, a few brave men, who had only ever pretended to believe in the monster, unearthed a chest of strange metal. The chest had been hidden by an earlier, wiser, freer people, who had lived in the land before the monster came, and had known a better way of life.

Ever so slowly, the men began to work the metal, which they called ‘reason’, using it to forge a new weapon, which they called ‘science’, and they used ‘science’ to attack the monster, and the very clever men. They had to be very careful at first because if anyone was caught using ‘science’, they would be dragged into market squares where they would be burned alive, and indeed this was how many men lost their lives.

But these were brave men, not to be fooled by fables or cowed by threats. Their band multiplied and their weapons grew in number and power until one day, a brilliant, reclusive rebel invented a super-weapon, which he called ‘evolution’, which could punch clean through the monster’s armoured scales.

After that, the attacks increased in frequency and ferocity until one day the rebels were able to show the people what they had long known themselves. The monster had never actually existed. It was just a tale told by the very clever men to keep themselves in riches and power. Slowly the truth spread and although some very clever men still cling to riches and power, and some very stupid ones still believe them, gradually, wonderfully, the world is being set free.

Or so the story goes. Every culture has its ancient creation myth, and this is atheism’s, albeit one that is only about 150 years old. Atheism emerged in Europe through the services of reason, science and evolution and in the teeth of often brutal religious opposition. In as far as the history of modern atheism is told, it is often a variant of this myth.

This book tries to tell a different story. This is not to say that atheism’s creation myth is wholly untrue. Creation myths are rarely wholly untrue. In this instance the tale is true enough to be believable, even if it’s not true enough to be true. Modern atheism did indeed emerge in Europe in the teeth of religious, i.e. Christian, opposition. But it had only a limited amount to do with reason and even less with science. The creation myth in which a few brave souls forged weapons made of a previously unknown material, to which the religious were relentlessly opposed, is an invention of the later nineteenth century, albeit one with ongoing popular appeal. In reality, this book argues, modern atheism was primarily a political and social cause, its development in Europe having rather more to do with the (ab)use of theologically legitimized political authority than it does with developments in science or philosophy.

One way of understanding this is to go back to the earliest years of the Christian church. In the first and second centuries, in as far as Christians were noticed at all, it was for their political disobedience, their apparently cannibalistic and incestuous rites, and their atheism.1 That Christians, of all people, should be accused of atheism will sound odd to modern readers. The reason lies partly in the fact that, like the Jews who faced similar accusations, early Christians had no visible idols: they appeared to worship nothing.2 But it also lies in the fact that, in thus limiting their worship, they refused to recognize the divinity of the emperor.

In about AD 160, the octogenarian bishop of Smyrna, Polycarp, was given a choice: either denounce your fellow (Christian) ‘atheists’ and burn incense to Caesar (thereby acknowledging his divinity), or face the pyre. He chose the latter, preferring instead to call the baying crowd ‘atheists’.3 Even in the ancient world which had – we like to imagine – a tolerant and flexible attitude to religious belief, who you worshipped was intricately tied up with questions of who you obeyed and how you lived. Rejecting the gods constituted a serious threat to public order, one that demanded severest punishment. Ancient atheism, at least in its Christian incarnation, was not only about denying the powers in heaven but also defying the powers on earth.

As with ancient atheism, so with modern: religion, in the form of Christianity, was the foundation of European culture in the early modern period. Belief in God determined the way people lived, the way they were governed and the way they structured society. It regulated their days, weeks and years, their births, marriages and deaths. It told them what to hope for and what to fear. It legitimized communities, kingdoms and empires. It explained the past, present and future, earth, heaven and the heavens, human origins, purpose and destiny. It was the key in which all life, human and natural, was composed, if not necessarily played.4 In the words of the historian turned Conservative politician, John Redwood, early modern Europe was ‘God-ridden’: ‘Whenever a man took up his pen and attempted to write about the weather, the seasons, the structure of the earth, the constitution of the heavens, the nature of political society, the organization of the Church, social morality or ethics he was by definition taking up his pen to write about God.’5 The implications for atheism were clear. To undermine religion was, in the words of the English Chief Justice in 1676, ‘to dissolve all those obligations whereby the civil societies are preserved’.6

Recognizing this helps free us from our own (historically rather unusual) conviction that since belief in God is an intellectual activity focused on questions such as ‘Who made the world?’ or ‘Does a supernatural realm exist?’, atheism is an intellectual activity that just comes up with different answers. Less about science disproving God, or even about God himself, the history of atheism is best seen as a series of disagreements about authority, the concept in which various concerns – does God exist, how do we know, how should we live and who should we obey – coalesce.

This is sometimes recognized in the more academic literature on the history of atheism. Thus, Victoria Frede, in her fine history of the emergence of Russian atheism between the 1820s and 1860s, has observed that ‘to treat atheism as a doctrine is … to miss its most salient feature. In Russia, it was less a statement about the status of God than it was a commentary on the status of educated people in an authoritarian state that sought ever more forcefully to regulate the opinions and beliefs of its subjects.’7

For ‘Russia’ read ‘the West’: the social and political contexts were critically different from one country to another (which helps explain why atheism took different forms in different places) but the religious-political nexus against which atheism emerged was omnipresent. Wherever you went, to deny God was not simply to deny God. It was to deny the emperor or the king who ruled you, the social structures that ordered your life, the ethical ties that regulated it, the hopes that inspired it and the judgement that reassured it.

This, then, is the first contention of this book: the history of atheism is best understood in social and political terms. It leads to a second contention. Atheism is too readily treated as a merely destructive phenomenon, a stripping away of structures, rituals and beliefs until it arrived at the naked ape that was always there waiting to be revealed. This is misleading. From the outset, atheism was a constructive and creative phenomenon.8

The mistake is wholly understandable. Atheism is, in the first instance, a parasitic creed, defined by what it is not, what it is against. Accordingly, a huge amount of energy has been deployed throughout its history – a wearying amount, if the historian is honest – in showing how wicked, stupid, corrupt, violent, ignorant, misleading and malign religion – for the most part Christianity – is. Retarded and self-deluding Christians, malevolent and manipulative priests, incomprehensible and meaningless doctrines, corrupt and hypocritical practices, delusional and dehumanizing hopes: these provide the staple diet of European atheists, many of whose writings have only rarely been burdened by a commitment to balance or a fear of repetition.

Yet, this is only part of the story. Being parasitic in the first instance does not mean being parasitic in everything. Precisely because Christianity was the foundation, the walls, the streets and the public order of European civilization, atheism was faced with the need to construct a different earthly city if its destruction of the existing one was ever going to be successful. ‘God does not exist’ might be an acceptable stance in the seminar room, but beyond it must either become ‘God does not exist so …’ or risk forfeiting public attention. Failure to complete the sentence rendered its first clause irrelevant or unpersuasive or simply dangerous. Anarchy appealed to no one.

The need to complete the sentence, for atheism to construct as well as destroy, leads to a third contention. We should, if we take points one and two seriously, talk about atheisms rather than atheism. The different ways in which different unbelievers have completed the sentence has generated creeds – the word is appropriate in the context – that are sufficiently different enough to be seen as a cluster of positions, rather than a single one. We do better to speak of a family of atheisms, rather than one single, holy, catholic and apostolic atheism.

This ‘family’ can be glimpsed in the huge range of words that have been used interchangeably with atheist over the last four centuries. These include Bright, Cartesian, communist, determinist, Epicurean, existentialist, fatalist, freethinker, Hobbist, humanist, infidel, irreligious, libertine, materialist, monist, naturalist, Nietzschean, rationalist, sceptic, secularist, Spinozist and unbeliever, to name only the less abusive terms. Few of these are exact synonyms but that is precisely the point. All these terms have been used of people who rejected God, but did so for different reasons, with different strengths of feeling, and drawing different conclusions. All were atheists (or, at least, alleged to be) but they adhered to subtly different atheisms.

If the socio-political nature of the history of atheism is poorly recognized, the existence of atheisms is even less so. Few historical accounts take seriously, or even notice, the range of atheisms present in European culture, one honourable exception being Susan Budd’s unjustly neglected study of Varieties of Unbelief in Britain in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries.

Things are changing. A 2012 article in the History of Human Sciences charts the differing ‘scientific’ and ‘humanistic’ courses within ‘the evolution of atheism’.9 The British Society for the Philosophy of Religion dedicated its 2013 conference to ‘Atheisms’. A sociological study recently published by the University of Tennessee outlined six distinct types of atheist: intellectual atheists, anti-theists, activists, seeker-agnostics, non-theists and ritual atheists.10 Examples like these, together with new academic ventures, such as the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network, suggest that the study of atheisms is coming of age.

Atheism is not an exclusively modern or Western phenomenon. The classical world had its non-believers, as does the non-Western one, although the precise nature of eastern ‘atheism’ often puzzled Westerners, and indeed became a major point of debate for the Catholic mission to China in the eighteenth century. That recognized, the focus of this book is modern (post c. 1500) and predominantly ‘Western’ (from Russia to the US) largely for reasons of length and authorial competence. But more is needed: it is nearly a century since the Austro-Hungarian theatre critic, novelist and sceptical agnostic Fritz Mauthner published his massive four-volume history of atheism.11 We are overdue another such offering.12

This book is separated into four chapters, although not in honour of Mauthner’s four volumes, which begin in the classical world. Chapter 1 takes the story from the Renaissance to the start of the eighteenth century and explains how atheism became a possibility in the Western mind. It argues that all the building blocks of an atheistic worldview – God absent, spirits non-existent, souls invented, creation unnecessary, matter everything (and eternal), providence imaginary, universe blind, life chance, miracles impossible, morality an entirely human affair, and humans no more than sophisticated animals – were in place, or at least available, at a very early stage, but that it took the massive theological, epistemological and political crisis precipitated by the Reformation to gather those blocks and turn them into a foundation. Atheism was possible by the late 1600s, certainly by the 1740s, even if it was not legal, let alone desirable.

Chapter 2 takes the story on to the end of the eighteenth century, in which a handful of pioneers, the most prominent in France, put forward the first openly and unapologetically atheist arguments since the classical period. It is also in this period that different countries start to take different paths, France, Britain and the new United States developing different cultures of atheism not so much on account of different philosophical or scientific cultures, but because of the different nature of their theo-political cultures. A rigidly authoritarian Catholic ancien régime in France created deep wells of moral indignation on which atheists could draw. The more tolerant settlement in Britain limited those wells, and the ‘wall of separation’ between church and state in America effectively drained them. If we seek a reason why atheism was the dog that didn’t bark in what became the most self-consciously modern, scientifically developed country on earth, it lies here.

Chapter 3 moves into the nineteenth century, the age of atheist promise. Here great systems of thought rubbed shoulders, explaining the past, inspiring the present and predicting the future, putting religious belief in its right place, and then transcending that place, moving people on to a truer understanding of historical progress, a better grasp of economics, or a more rational form of ritual and practice. For all the very real civic and social burdens placed on them at the time, this was the moment to be alive as an atheist, when progress predicted the death of God as humanity moved into broad, sunlit rational uplands.

It didn’t turn out quite like that and the final chapter takes the story into the twentieth century, when atheism faced and created problems previously hidden or unimagined. This was the age when Nietzsche lifted the veil on much hypocritical moral posturing by his atheist peers; when logical positivists gleefully hammered home the final nail in the coffin of God-talk, only to find the whole thing was made of papier-mâché and that God hadn’t been in the coffin in the first place; when the experience of two world wars left many in Europe, particularly in France, doubting the humanist credentials of atheism; and, most painfully, when attempts to build atheist societies populated with new men (and the occasional new woman) in Russia, China, Albania, North Korea and elsewhere ended up humiliating, enslaving and killing on a scale that made previous religious wars look like playground scuffles. It was an age in which atheism came out and came of age, and it wasn’t pretty.

The British philosopher Anthony Kenny ended his New History of Western Philosophy by outlining how the American Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga resurrected the ontological argument for God at the end of the twentieth century. This, Kenny reminds us by quoting Bertrand Russell’s own History of Western Philosophy, was once thought a closed case. The argument, wrote Russell, ‘was invented by Anselm, rejected by Thomas Aquinas, accepted by Descartes, refuted by Kant, and reinstated by Hegel. I think it may be said quite decisively,’ Russell opined, ‘that … modern logic has proved this argument invalid.’ Plantinga’s reformulation, Kenny remarks, serves as ‘a salutary warning of the danger that awaits any historian of logic who declares a philosophical issue definitively closed’.13

The ontological argument is mercifully absent from these pages, but the salutary warning retains its power. Those who have pronounced the sentence of death on God, or on atheists, have done so prematurely. Both are here to stay.

1

Possibilities

Types of atheism

‘There is nothing but infidelity, infidelity, infidelity’: An early modern plague

Early modern Europe was crawling with atheists. In Italy, wrote Roger Ascham, in 1551, ‘a man may freely discourse against what he will, against whom he lust, against any Prince, against any government, yea against God himself, and his whole religion’.1 The Englishmen who lived there, he later lamented, are ‘Epicures in living and atheists in doctrine.’2 It was a land, according to one seventeenth-century writer, of ‘pox, poisoning, and atheism’.3 Voltaire spoke for many when he wrote in The Sage and the Atheist that ‘Italy, in the fifteenth century, was full of atheists – and what was the consequence? Cases of poisoning were as common as invitations to supper’.4

Italy was particularly bad, long infected by pagan authors, but nowhere was immune. Inquisitorial records from fifteenth-century Spain offer examples of universalism, materialism and unbridled scepticism aplenty. France was no better. The Jesuit Francois Garasse identified five different types of atheism in his country – ‘furious and enraged atheism’, ‘atheism of libertinage and corruption of manners’, ‘atheism of profanation’, ‘wavering or unbelieving atheism’ and ‘brutal, lazy, melancholy atheism’ – all of which were, of course, reprehensible.5 Marin Mersenne, a French theologian, philosopher and mathematician of repute, claimed there were as many as 50,000 atheists in Paris in the early seventeenth century.6

Northern Europe was not spared the shame. When Jakob Friedrich Reimann published his history of books in German lands in 1713, he explained how atheism had been a live issue since the twelfth century when it arose in the wake of Averroism and Emperor Friedrich II.7 According to Matthias Knutzen, himself a prominent atheist, there was an underground society of 700 sworn atheists in late seventeenth-century German academic circles.

Holland was particularly notorious during the seventeenth century as the European capital of free thought and infidelity. It was in Holland, for example, that the Devil, witchcraft and demonic spirits were first methodically denounced and banned, albeit by Balthasar Bekker, a sincere Dutch minister. And it was in Holland that Europe’s most formidable and comprehensive atheistic system originated and took root, during Bekker’s life.

And then there was England. A Discourse on the Present State of England, a report to Lord Burleigh, in 1572, claimed that ‘the realm is divided into three parties, the Papists, the Atheists, and the Protestants’.8 The Puritan Richard Greenham claimed that ‘atheism in England is more to be feared than Popery’.9 Walter, Earl of Essex, complained in 1576 that in England ‘there is nothing but infidelity, infidelity, infidelity, atheism, atheism, atheism’.10 More desperately still, Thomas Nashe wrote in his Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem, ‘there is no sect now in England so scattered as Atheism. In vain do you preach, in vain do you teach … how many followers this damnable paradox has; how many high wits it hath bewitched.’11

So prevalent was atheism among Elizabethan intellectuals that some even formed schools, coteries dedicated to its discussion and dissemination. An official enquiry held at Cerne Abbas in 1594 into Sir Walter Raleigh and his circle of eminent Elizabethan atheists found that they denied the reality of heaven and hell, and argued that ‘we die like beasts, and when we are gone there is no remembrance of us’.12 By 1600, the Bishop of Exeter could complain that in his diocese it was ‘a matter very common to dispute whether there be a God or not’. Seventeen years later, a Spanish ambassador estimated that the number of English atheists was somewhere in the region of 900,000,13 or around a sixth of the population.

Refutations were everywhere. From the late sixteenth century onwards, booksellers sold a growing number of books refuting godlessness. Texts like Philip of Mornay’s comprehensively named A Woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian Religion, written in French: Against Atheists, Epicures, Paynims, Jews, Mahumetists, and other Infidels [originally written in French], or John Dove’s A Confutation of Atheisme14 stood on English shelves, just as André D’Abillon’s La Divinité défendue contre les athées and David Derodon’s L’athéisme convaincu did in France.15

It was all to no avail. Atheism spread, and not just among the ill-educated from whom the authorities should have expected little better. It was one thing for people like John Deryner of Great Bedwyn in Wiltshire to maintain that ‘there was no God and no resurrection, and that men died a death like beasts’ (although he perhaps shouldn’t have voiced such an opinion in front of the parish children); or for Ralph Byckenell of Over Compton in Dorset to tell his minister that ‘there was no God, and that he could prove by certain arguments’ (although as Byckenell was churchwarden one might have hoped for better).16 But it was quite another when respectable men like Thomas Harriot (mathematician and astronomer), George Gascoigne (poet and soldier), John Caius (physician), Nicholas Bacon (Lord Keeper of the Great Seal), and the Earl of Oxford were suspect.17

There were official enquiries, such as that into the Cerne Abbas circle, but they were of no avail. Atheism spread through Europe like an unspiritual plague. The former Augustinian canon and satirist Ferrante Pallavicino, for example, brought ‘heresy and atheism’ back to Italy from Germany after he had met a French soldier on campaign there. At least, that was what his biographer claimed.18

Living in a pre-scientific age, early modern Europeans would not have known about memes, but had they done so, they surely would have thought atheism spread like one. It was everywhere, a veritable virus of the mind. Indeed, according to Robert Burton, it was best treated like an illness. ‘Atheism, idolatry, heresy, hypocrisy, though they have one common root, that is indulgence to corrupt affection, yet their growth is different, they have divers symptoms, occasions, and must have several cures and remedies.’19

‘The word atheist is now used as the word barbarous was’: The meaning of atheism

Or perhaps not: you don’t have to read very far in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to realize that early modern Europeans did not use the word atheist in the way that we do. Nor do you have to read far to realize that they were not overly cautious in their usage. The word was thrown about with as much abandonment as Communist during the McCarthy years, and to a similar effect.

Atheist was, in essence, a smear. The word could be used of those who (allegedly) denied divine providence, and of those who (allegedly) denied God’s involvement in the world; of those who denied the immortality of the soul and of those who denied the existence of hell and heaven; of those who denied the doctrine of creation and of those who denied the existence of the spirit world. It was used by Catholics of Protestants, who denied the authority of God’s representative on earth, and by Protestants of Catholics, who evaded and ignored God’s word in scripture by placing their trust in a worldly authority. It could, in other words, be used very loosely to denote any heterodox belief that smelled even a little bit like the denial of God.

More extravagantly still, it could be used – indeed was used, universally – to describe those whose behaviour was anti-social or immoral. The Jacobean author Nicholas Breton put this well in his 1616 book of didactic character sketches, The Good and the Badde, or Descriptions of the Worthies and Unworthies of this Age. In this he described the Atheist, ‘or Most Bad Man’, as a figure of desperation, ‘who dares to anything even to his soul’s damnation’, making ‘sin a jest, grace a humour, truth a fable, and peace a cowardice’.

Breton was not done with this. The atheist, he explained, ‘is the danger of society, the love of vanity, the hate of charity, and the shame of humanity … The tavern is his palace and his belly is his god … He knows not God, nor thinks of heaven but walks through the world as a devil towards hell.’20 Not much had changed by the end of the century. The deist Charles Blount observed in 1680, ‘the word atheist is now used, as heretofore the word barbarous was, all persons differing in Opinions, Customs or Manners being then term’d Barbarous, as now Atheists’.21

At the same time as early modern Europeans threw the accusation of atheism as wide as a farmer sowing seed, they also took care to define and analyse it with great precision. Francis Bacon identified four causes of atheism in his short essay on the subject – ‘divisions in religion’, ‘scandal of priests’, ‘custom of profane scoffing in holy matters’, and ‘learned times, specially with peace and prosperity; for troubles and adversities do more bow men’s minds to religion’ – adding that ‘a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion’.22 Later in the century, the Cambridge Platonist philosopher Ralph Cudworth, in his massive True Intellectual System of the Universe outdid Bacon and outlined 14 grounds on which atheism was possible, ranging from the impossibility of the human mind to comprehend God to the evident defectiveness of Providence.

However many causes of atheism there were, there were undoubtedly numerous kinds of atheist. Perhaps in honour of the Holy Trinity, there were often three kinds. According to Laurent Pollot there were those ‘who do not know the true God’, those who ‘doubt or even feel or speak ill of God’s providence’, and those who ‘force themselves to erase all sentiments of divinity from their heart, and blaspheming miserably, say there is no God’.23 According to the French Calvinist and theologian David Derodon, there were ‘the refined’, who were philosophical sceptics; ‘the debauched’, who lived immorally without care for God’s laws; and ‘the ignorant’ whose belief was weak or inadequate.24

Pierre Bayle, one of Europe’s arch-atheists himself, at least in the mind of his critics, also spoke of ‘three degrees of Atheism’ in his influential Dictionnaire historique et critique. ‘The first is to maintain that there is no

Reviews for Atheists

[oataker-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A history of how atheism has prospered developed and oppressed over the past 500 years. Originally a suppressed vice it gradually became widely acknowledged. Its rise is intimately linked with criticism of Christianity or the bible, in fact one message of the book is that it becomes most virulent when reacting to a powerful or oppressive Christianity. A vast number of writers are mentioned but the arguments, either way are not analysed although they are mentioned at times. The appeal of atheism to Science is a recurrent theme. I would have liked more assessment of some writers and less of an overview.